This awful period often comes with greater rapidity than we think. When we speak of sinners who are become incorrigible, we understand not only the aged, who have run a course of fifty or sixty years in crimes, and in whom sin is become natural. We speak also of those less advanced in age; who have refused to devote to God the early years of youth who have assumed the fashionable title of infidelity, and atheism; who are, in effect, become atheists, and have imbibed prejudices, from which it is now impossible to move them. At first this was simply a want of zeal; then it became indifference, then followed coldness and indolence, afterwards con tempt of religion, and in the issue, the most obstinate and outrageous profaneness. I: select cases which are yet susceptible of good impressions. They are providentially placed in open view to inspire you with holy fear; God has exposed them in his church as buoys and beacons, erected on the coast to warn the mariners; they say, keep your distance in passing here, fly this dreadful place, let the remains of this shipwreck induce you to seek deep waters and a safer course.

III. Let us produce a third example, and would to God that we had less authority for producing it, and fewer instructions on the subject! This is dying men ;....an example which you adduce to harden yourselves in vice; but which if properly understood, is much calculated to excite alarm. We We see, in general, that every dying man, however wicked he may have been during life, seems to be converted on the approach of death; and we readily persuade ourselves that it is so in effect: and consequently, that there is no great difficulty in becoming regenerate in our last moments. But two things have always prejudiced me against a late repentance ;...* the characters, and the consequences.

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First, as to the characters of this repentance. Af. ter acquiring some knowledge of the human heart, we fully perceive that there is nothing in it but what is extorted; that it is the fear of punishment, not the sentiments of religion and equity; that it is the approach of death, not an abhorrence of sin; that it is the terrors of hell, not the effusions of true zeal, which animate the heart. The sailor, while enjoy ing a favourable breeze, braves the Deity, uttering his blasphemies against Heaven, and apparently ac knowledging no Providence but his profession and industry. The clouds become black; the sluices of heaven open; the lightnings flash in the air; the thunders become tremendous; the winds roar; the surge foams; the waves of the ocean seem to ascend to heaven; and heaven in turn seems to descend into the abyss. Conscience alarmed by these terrific objects, and more so by the image of hell, and the ex pectation of immediate and inevitable death, endea vours to humble itself before the pursuing vengeance of God. Blasphemy is changed to blessing, pre sumption to prayer, security to terror. This wick ed man suddenly becomes a saint of the first class; and as though he would deceive the Deity, after having deceived himself, he arrogates as the reward of this false reform, admission into heaven, and claims the whole rewards of true repentance.

What! conversions of this kind dazzle christians! What! sailors, whose tears and cries owe their origin to the presence of immediate danger, from which they would be saved! But it is not in the agitation produced by peril, that we may know whether we have sincere recourse to God. It is in tranquil and recollected moments, that the soul can best examine and investigate its real condition. It is not when the world has quitted us, that we should begin like true christians to quit the world; it is when the world smiles, and invites us to taste its charms.

: What decides on those hasty resolutions are the consequences. Of all the saints that have been made in haste, you find scarcely one, on deliverance from danger, who fulfils the vows he has made. There is scarcely one who does not relapse into vice with the same rapidity he seemed to be saved from it; a most conclusive argument this, that such conver, sions are not sincere. Had it been true zeal, and divine love which dictated all those professions, and kindled that fire which seemed to burn, you would, no doubt, have retained the effects; but finding no fruit of your fervent resolutions, we ought to be convinc. ed that they were extorted. Can your heart thus pass in one moment from two extremes? Can it pass in one moment from repentance to obduracy, and from obduracy to repentance? Can it correct in one moment habits of vice and assume habits of piety; and renounce with equal ease habits of piety, to resume habits of vice? The case of infants, whom the Creator introduces into life, ought to correct your judgment, concerning those from whom he takes it away.

To all these proofs, my brethren, which I am not permitted to state in all their lustre, I fear lest another should soon be added ;....I fear lest a fourth example should convince the world how dangerous it is to delay conversion. This proof, this example is no other than the major part of yourselves. On considering the way of life which most of you follow, we find but too much cause for this awful conjecture. But should we see you, without alarm, run headlong into the abyss from which you cannot be delivered by neverceasing lamentations and tears? No, my brethren, we will redouble our intreaties, we will make fresh exertions to press on your minds these important truths.

APPLICATION.

The first thing we require of you is to enter inte your own heart, to do justice to yourselves, to con

fess that most of you are in the awful situation we. have attacked; that you are nearly all guilty of de laying conversion. I know the human heart has its illusions, and the conscience its depths. But, after all, you are not infatuated to this excess; some of you are carried away with avarice, others with am-: bition, some with voluptuousness, others with slander, and some with a haughtiness which nothing can bend: living, as most of you do, resident in a city where you find all the temptations of vice in high life, and all the facility in the haunts of infamy, you are not so far blinded as to think that you are in a state of regeneration, while you persist in this course. And, as I supposed before, that no one of you is so far infatuated as to say, I have made my choice, I am resolved to cast myself headlong into the pit of destruction, and to be a victim of eternat vengeance; as no one of you has carried infatuation to this extreme, I am right in concluding, that nearly all of you rely on a future conversion. Begin here, begin by doing justice to yourselves on this point. This is the first thing we require you to do.

The second is, to recollect the arguments we have urged in our preceding discourses, against the delay of conversion, and confess their force. In the first we addressed you as well-informed and rational beings; we proved from the human constitution, that conversion becomes either difficult or impracticable in proportion as it is deferred. In the second, we addressed you as christians, who acknowledge a revelation, received from Heaven; and we endeavoured to prove these truths by that revelation, by the character of the economy of the Holy Spirit; by the nature and conditions of the new covenant :....capital points of faith, fundamental articles of religion, which you cannot evade, if you have the smallest shadow of Christianity. To-day we have directed all our efforts to enable you to comprehend the same things by clear, certain, and indisputable experience. Overlooking, therefore, every thing which

concerns us in particular, and our weakness, which we acknowledge and feel, do justice to our proofs; acknowledge their force; and inquire, whether you have yet any thing further to object. Seek, examine, and sound. Is it not true, that bad habits be-. come confirmed with age? Predominate in the heart? Take possession of all the intellectual powers, and transform themselves, so to speak, into our nature? Is it not true, that habits of piety are not acquired instantaneously, in a moment by a sudden wish, and a simple emotion of the soul? Is it not true, that this detachment from sensible objects, this giving up the world, this self-denial, this zeal, this fervor, the indispensable duties of religion, the essential characters of a christian, is it not true, that they are not the acquisitions of a moment, of an hour, of a day? Is it not true, that, to attain this happy state, there must be time, labour, and repeated en deavours; consequently, that a transient thought on a death-bed, and in the last periods of life, is totally inadequate to so great a work? Is it not true, that the Holy Spirit, in extending his assistance, requires us to ask his aids, yield to his entreaties, and payi videference to his word? Is it not true, that he abandons to themselves those who resist his work; that it is thence concluded in the scripture that we need his grace for our sanctification; and that we ought to work out our salvation with so much the more diligence? Is it not true, that mercy has restrictions and bounds, that it is promised to those only who conform to the covenant of grace, that those condi tions are not a momentary repentance, a slight recourse to mercy, a superficial desire to participate in the merits of Christ's death; they imply such a total change, renovation of heart, and transformation of the soul, that when infirmities render usc incapa ble of fulfilling those obligations, we may find ourselves within the sphere of evangelical promises. Is it not true, in short, that those truths are not found